A team led by Microsoft of physicists has withdrawn a high-profile 2018 document that the company announced as a key breakthrough in the creation of a practical quantum computer, a device that promises great computing power by leveraging quantum mechanics.
The reprimanded document came from a laboratory run by Microsoft physicist Leo Kouwenhoven at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He claimed to have found evidence of Majorana particles, theorized for a long time but never conclusively detected. Elusive entities are at the center of Microsoft’s focus on quantum computing hardware, lagging behind that of others such as IBM and Google.
WIRED reported last month that other physicists had questioned the discovery after receiving more complete data from the Delft team. Sergey Frolov, of the University of Pittsburgh, and Vincent Mourik, of the University of New South Wales, Australia, said information that questioned Majorana’s claim appeared to be withheld.
On Monday, the original authors published a retraction note in the prestigious journal Nature, who published the previous document, admitting that the complainants were right. It is said that “the data was corrected unnecessarily.” The note also says that repeating the experiment revealed an erroneous calibration error that skewed all the original data, which made Majorana’s observation a mirage. “We apologize to the community for the insufficient scientific rigor in our original manuscript,” the researchers wrote.
Frolov and Mourik’s concerns also sparked an investigation in Delft, which on Monday released a report from four physicists not involved in the project. It is concluded that the researchers did not intend to deceive, but were “trapped by the emotion of the moment” and selected data that fit their own hopes of a major discovery. The report sums up this breach of the rules of the scientific method with a quote from Nobel laureate in physics Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you should not deceive yourself and that you are the easiest person to deceive.” .
The Delft lab on Monday released raw data from the 2018 experiment. Frolov and Mourik say it should also publish full data from its Majorana hunting project dating back to 2010 for other people to analyze.
In a statement, Lieven Vandersypen, scientific director of the Delft Center for Quantum Research, described the article’s retraction as “a setback” and said that “reflection on the methods used must now follow its course within the scientific community “. The center will continue to work with Microsoft.
In a statement, Microsoft’s vice president of quantum computing, Zulfi Alam, described the treatment of the authors’ incidents as “an excellent example of the scientific process at work” and said the company remains confident in its approach. to develop quantum computers.
In a statement, a spokesman for Nature he said the journal aims to quickly update the scientific record when published results are questioned, but that “these issues are often complex and, as a result, may take time to be fully written by authors and editors.”
No one seems close to building a quantum computer complex enough to do a useful job, but in recent years big companies like Google and IBM and some startups have shown impressive prototypes. Microsoft took a different approach, claiming that once it took advantage of Majoranas it could create practical quantum hardware faster than rivals because the technology would be more reliable. The company has been working on its nonconformist quantum project since 2004. It incorporated Kouwenhoven into the staff in 2016 after getting encouraging results in its lab with the support of Microsoft.
Microsoft’s Majorana disaster adds a new chapter to the myth of particles, named after Italian theorist Ettore Majorana. He hypothesized in 1937 that there should be subatomic particles that are his own antiparticles, but that seemed to disappear early the following year after boarding a ship.
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